Comelec plan to purchase poll machines ‘illegal’–watchdog

MANILA, Philippines—The decision of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to buy the Smartmatic International Corp. poll machines for next year’s midterm balloting “is illegal, exclusivist, and risky,” a poll watchdog said.

“It will leave one foreign company, Smartmatic, monopolizing the technology system in all elections and even running the whole political exercise forever,” the Automated Election System Watch (AES Watch) said in a statement.

Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes Jr. on Tuesday said the poll agency was considering its “option to purchase” the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines that Smartmatic leased to the government for the May 2010 national elections.

AES Watch co-convener Nelson J. Celis said the poll body’s “option to purchase” as provided for in the June 2009 contract with Smartmatic had long expired in December 2010.

Under questionable circumstances, the option was extended to March and then December 2011 this time with a 20 percent increase in the original price.

“Why buy a machine which, as the poll body itself admitted, was fraught with deficiencies and errors that (reports revealed) affected the accuracy, canvassing, and consolidation of election results in 2010, according to reports …” said Celis, who helped in the drafting of the election modernization law or RA 9369.

“Until now, Smartmatic has been unable to show whether corrections have been made to its system, as it promised last January 2011,” he said.

Celis, who is also the president of the Philippine Computer Society Foundation, said the P1.8 billion needed to buy the Smartmatic machines is not “cheaper” either.

“The selling price is higher than the 2003 Mega Pacific’s 1,991automated counting machines (ACMs) worth only P1.3 billion. The canvassing and consolidation system (CCS or backend machine) developed by Comelec’s IT department under Lagman cost the government only P1 million against the foreign company’s P30 million plus offer,” he said.

Dr. Pablo Manalastas, IT consultant of the Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG), said the foreign company’s marked failures in complying with major provisions of the automated election law (RA 9369) particularly the minimum system capabilities for the system used in 2010 should already disqualify Smartmatic from either its PCOS machines being purchased or from participating in the bidding that is supposed to start this month.

“Instead of making Smartmatic liable for non-compliance to the election law and for the deficiencies of its system Comelec, under Chairman Sixto BrillantesJr., chose to thank and then award the foreign company with yet another questionable contract,” Manalastas, an IT professor from Ateneo and UP, said.

Celis said buying a defective product “is definitely against the Procurement Law and violates the high standards and best practices of IT industry and business computerization.”